Take Your Best Shot: Get Better Screen Shots for Print
Set Up Your Screen Properly For Best Screen Capture Results

Continued... • Part 2: Preparing Screen Captures for Print    Related Resources • Screen Capture Tips & Techniques • Best Graphics Formats    From Graphics Software • Screen Capture Utilities for PC • Screen Capture Utilities for Mac • Screen Shot Tips & Tricks (for On-screen display)    Join the Discussion "You will not be able to get a clean image from a sceen shot if you resample in Photoshop, it wil come out extremely blurry but the trick is to take the screen shot and resize it in a page layout program." Calvin L.    Join the Discussion Still have questions or want more details on any aspect of desktop publishing? Join us in the Forums • General DTP • Type & Fonts • DTP Classroom

Set Up Your Screen
The first step in creating good screen captures is setting up the screen and the application windows.

• Set up your screen with the final destination of your screen capture in mind. Good color schemes and fonts for on-screen display do not necessarily translate well to color or grayscale printing.

• Be consistent in the screen resolution settings of your monitor and the size of the application windows.

• Unless your object is to show off wallpaper and wild color schemes, stick with non-exotic colors such as the standard Windows desktop scheme. You can create a color scheme specifically for doing screen captures.

• Avoid desktop color schemes that include gradient colors. Switch to solid colors.

• Consider converting color screen captures to grayscale. Experiment — some color combinations work better in grayscale than others.

• Color combinations that look good on-screen may not look as clear in print. For example, black text on a dark background can be hard to read.

• If capturing the mouse pointer is important, consider using a larger than normal pointer size. Make sure its placement on the screen doesn't obscure important information.

• Clear the capture area of non-essential elements as much as possible to avoid confusion. (These things can also be cropped out of the picture during editing but it can save you time if you avoid capturing excess toolboxes or portions of the desktop in the first place.)

The following portions of screen captures illustrate how your desktop background and color scheme can affect the look of your screen capture. There is a slight change in some colors and the text becomes slightly blurred in the print versions.

Screen-optimized captures using three different themes.

Simulation of those same screen captures in print (inkjet).

Simulation of each capture converted and printed in grayscale.

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